Beginning in the 1960's, technology has been developed to machine score optically-scanned answer documents. Although the hardware has improved over the years, the basic approach has not changed. Students respond to multiple choice questions by completely filling in "bubbles" on a machine scannable answer document using a "number two" pencil. When the document is scanned, the hardware (scanner) identifies the dark mark for each question and electronically stores the student's responses.
As scanners and computer hardware have become more affordable, this technology has been implemented in most school districts throughout the country. Inexpensive commercial software packages are now available to operate the scanners and their associated microcomputers. Two of the most commonly used software packages are SCANTOOLS from National Computer Systems (Minneapolis, Minn.) and BASIC SCRIPT from Scantron Corporation (Tustin, Calif.).
This approach to test administration has proved to be very cost effective since thousands of answer sheets can be processed and scored quickly and automatically. However, students are unable to review the scored exam since the actual test is kept blank with the selected answers only appearing on the "bubble" sheet. Since feedback is an important aspect of the learning process, this inability to meaningfully review test results has represented a serious deficit in the art.
In response to this need, a new technology has begun to evolve whereby test documents, instead of "bubble" sheets, are scanned and the entire image of each test page is stored as a graphical bitmap. After scanning, the completed exam is scored by the instructor on the computer and can then be viewed by the student, thus providing the desired feedback. Unfortunately, this technology requires an enormous amount of disk space since each page of each exam for each student is stored as a graphic. In addition, it takes much more time to scan an entire test document than to scan a one page answer document. And, after the documents have been captured and stored on disk, the tests must be manually reviewed and manually scored by the instructor.
What has been missing in the art is an efficient technology that retains the advantages of scanning a "bubble" sheet and yet allows students to review their responses and obtain feedback in a meaningful manner. The present invention is directed to solving this important problem in the art.